The rougher and readier cousin of Marketing magazine. You'll find ideas, gossip, commentary and a touch of cynicism as we flex our journalistic muscles beyond the constraints of our monthly mag.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Please explain

The Health Promotion Board’s latest anti-smoking campaign includes a TVC graphically showing a mouth cancer sufferer talking about the ill effects of smoking – the ad is good, very soul wrenching and hard hitting, but is it original?

The videos are a splitting image from the ‘Quitting is hard, not quitting is harder’ tagline to the graphic images of the mouth cancer symptoms on the woman speaking – this has all left me feeling a liitle…how should I say this… ‘uncomfortable’.

Can someone help come up with an explanation for all this? Does the Straits Time’s print version credit the Australian campaign or offer up any explanations?

7 comments:

I first thought the ad was pretty original and rather good. But was appalled when I read this blog entry.

Apparently Australia ran the campaign in July 2006 and from the Quit website, I also found out that the campaign was "produced by The Campaign Palace/Red Cell".

I also noted the disclaimer on one of the pages on the campaign: "As well as being liable to pay compensation, a person reproducing or adapting this work in breach of the Copyright Act may also be liable to prosecution for a criminal offence."

If Singapore's campaign was produced by the same agency, then I guess you can count it as a legal "adaptation". But if it's by another agency, won't this count as plagiarism?

So important question here is; is this done by the same agency as the one that did the Australian campaign? Though, I would question the effectiveness of the ads in the long-run. People tend to get a 'numb' after awhile.

I sent an email to ask the reporter about this. Her reply to me (which I'm not allowd to publish) basically alluded to the fact that the HPB campaign was "based on" the Australian campaign.

Moreover, according to the reporter's email, this isn't the first time the HPB has used material from Australian campaigns, stating that past anti-smoking campaigns have also "mirrored" other Australian ads.

What I find disturbing is how she also added that according to HPB they were not required to credit the source of ads they are "mirroring".

Makes me wonder... if they plan on mirroring ads from other countries, why bother opening up a tender for ad agencies to pitch their ideas?

Wow! OK, let us mirror our favourite Rembrandt and Picasso's and since it is "based on" those masterpieces, we will not need to credit them! Yay! Just for YOU GUYS, you can have my "based on" masterpiece for ONLY $10million!!